IN THEIR WORDS – BLAKE WILHELM ROUND 13

Friday, June 16, 2017 - 6:03 PM by Blake Wilhelm

THE player columns have been rather quiet of late, so Pikey thought it would be fitting to enlist my help to bring them back to life in 2017.

I will start with a recap of last week, which was a massive week for West Perth Football Club with one of the all-time greats Andrew 'ya can't say that' Strijk playing his 200th game for the club. This is an absolutely outstanding achievement to be able to play such a large number of games for the one club, and I feel honoured that I got to play in the milestone game with him and also help celebrate with a win. Hopefully the bluetack can continue to hold his body together and he can continue to help us win games.

Whilst the disappointing loss to East Perth the week before was hard to swallow, as a playing group we knew that we play best when we are challenged and had all the confidence in ourselves that we could travel to Steel Blue and get the job done. Which is exactly what we did, and if the majority of our forward line (namely myself) didn't have the "yips" then the scoreboard would have reflected a better picture of how I feel we played on the weekend.

As always there were standouts, with Dean 'the glove' Munns putting the clamps on his opponent, Shane 'where's my wallet' Nelson racking up another 40, Tyler 'yips' Keitel shaking off the nickname and kicking truly with a bag of four, and Jay 'grubs better' van Berlo leading from the front and willing us to a victory. Whilst he did have a good game, 'Grub' aka Mitch van Berlo is still by far the better van Berlo.

However the real standout from last week for me was Aidan 'Simple Jack' Lynch, channelling his inner Ben Stiller when he asked Kael 'the coolest man' Coleman to give him a haircut. However to be fair the haircut is better than Trent Manzone's freshly plucked eyebrows courtesy of Hammo's girlfriend. You just can't do that.

It is also worth mentioning for those of you who have seen Coey outside of the footy club that the answer is YES. Coey does have other clothes apart from his West Perth kit. A few of the Swans ressies players last week posed the question mid game (much to the amusement of Lynchy) as they continued to see him in in the Blue and Red at Uni. So I thought I would just let them know on here incase they happen to come across this article.

Moving on to this week we face another massive challenge against a South Fremantle team who are coming off a loss to Peel last week. This will be a massive character building game for us and the vibe this week amongst the playing group has been really positive, with the boys confident that we can put in a great predominance at home and come away with the four points.

It's been a few weeks now since we have played at home and I can't wait to get down to HBF Arena tomorrow and put in a good performance.